tomlgoodwi

Wouldn't a retrogressive tax structure -- the more you make, the lower percentage the government takes -- accomplish just as much? In such a system, if you are in a low-income/high-tax-bracket group, you will just have to work twice as hard (or twice as long) to increase your income and escape into the next (i.e., lower) tax bracket. There is of course a fallacy here, but it isn't much different from the fallacy in the quote.

Following up on comments above by Ken and Richard: No, the "short major" overcall of a minor-suit opening bid is not at all something new under the sun. Ken says he toyed with the idea fifteen or twenty years ago, and I don't doubt that he did. In fact, there was an article by Jim Wood in The Bridge World in 1983 entitled "The Anticipatory Overcall," which described exactly this proposed tactic against minor-suit opening bids by people who didn't open five-card majors. (This was before "Could be Short" achieved much of a following, so the minor-suit opening bids in question implied three or more in the suit.) Anticipatory Overcalls were barred by ACBL regulators, who ruled that they were forbidden as controlled psyches. As Richard suggests, life may have been breathed back into that type of defensive method when the minor-suit opening bid (or the one-diamond response) could be on a doubleton (or less) and as such is conventional, as it appears that they might be in the version of Montreal Relay that Ken describes. It might be fun when opponents announce minor-suit opening bids that could be short to respond that we are playing "Could be Short vs. Could be Short," meaning that our major-suit overcalls could also be on a doubleton. At least one World Champion pair, Bocchi-Duboin, have advertised that they were playing "canape overcalls" over standard minor-suit opening bids. By this they meant the 1M overcall would be on two or three cards, with a 5+-card suit somewhere else in the hand. I don't think they played that 1M might also be just a normal long-suit overcall. (Woods' Anticipatory Overcall could be either short or long.) I don't know what kind of results they had with canape overcalls, and I don't know whether anyone is still playing them.

Sounds like your partner wasn't in on the joke, either . . . .

I don't have a lot of experience vs. MR, so maybe this is wildly wrong. But, if I were playing against it and heard the bidding go 1C-P-1D to me, I cannot imagine many hands on which I wouldn't bid 1M, either one, regardless of what I actually hold in M. I would of course pre-alert this, as I assume the MRers will pre-alert their method. In other words, I suspect the MR might collapse under the weight of frequent and fairly random 1M overcalls. Does anyone have any experience bearing on this?

The original question wasn't whether opening three-card majors is a good idea, but whether there is a principled distinction between saying on the one hand that "two-card minors" is a natural treatment (although a "natural" bid in a minor implies three or more cards), and on the other hand that "three-card majors" is a (banned) convention (since a "natural" bid in a major implies four or more cards). I'm not interested in playing "three-card majors," only in exploring the rationale (if there is one) for these regulations.

As I recall it, Roman Club was banned in large part because of its three-card major openings.

Or maybe they are uncommon because they would be considered conventional . . . .

There is in another thread a discussion about permitted defenses to "could be short" minor-suit openings. It appears that the ACBL, or at least one faction of it, has deemed that an opening suit bid of one in a two-card minor suit is a "treatment," not an artificial convention, so that "anything goes" defensive methods are not applicable. Well, what about an opening suit bid of one in a three-card major suit? Is this also a "treatment" that is permitted under the General Convention Chart? If not, why not? Is there a principled reason to distinguish between the two cases? TLGoodwin